Some days, there isn’t much news to report. Today is one of those days. The sensible thing would be to go play a few delightful indie games, pen a few more Skyrim misadventures or open my very veins to hold forth about how Chuckie Egg made me, but the sensible thing feels far too involved when I’ve only poisoned my body and mind with one cup of hot, brown caffeinated liquid so far today. So instead, here’s the entirely fabricated news I wish I was writing.

Skyrim patch incoming

Following news that, at 280,000 concurrent players at its peak, Skyrim has broken player count records on Steam (that bit is actually true), Bethesda decide to take the PC entirely seriously again and will release a patch containing a slew of new graphics settings that everyone’s worked out how to do in ini files already. “Sorry,” said a man, “it’s a mystery to us that we didn’t put those options in in the first place too. Yeah, it’s pretty embarrassing that people can make the game look orders of magnitude better with a few quick tweaks in Notepad, isn’t it? I think we were distracted by a cute dog or something. Oh, there’s another one! Look at its floppy ears!”

XCOM FPS remake “a marketing ruse”

Turns out the controversial remake of godlike strategy game X-COM as a noisy FPS was a red herring. “Yeah, we’re not going to do that,” said a man. “I mean, it doesn’t make a lick of sense, does it? I’m amazed anyone fell for it, to be honest. The truth is we knocked up a few trailers to get the X-COM name back in the public consciousness – what we’re actually doing is a full-on remake of the original game. We’ve been secretly working with the Gollops for a few years now, and it’s so exciting that I think I’m going to fai….”

Syndicate remake renamed “Future Manshoot”

“It just seemed like the sensible thing to do”, said a man.

First Skyrim DLC announced

Fears of horse armour and oddly disconnected standalone dungeons were allayed today, as Bethesda revealed the first DLC for Skyrim would be a complete, faithful remake of the entirety of Morrowind in the updated engine. “Well, it was perhaps our finest hour,” said a man. “Seems silly not to keep it alive, doesn’t it?

2D Boy reveal their next game

Seriously – come on, get a move on, chaps.

Half-Life 3 on Steam now

Hahahahahahahahaahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.

Avalanche given Transformers license

“I don’t know why they didn’t think of us before,” said a man. “So what we’re doing is making another big, highly destructible open world. You’ll play as Starscream, and you fly around being a massive dick to everything. Humans are only there to stomped on. Or squished. Or hurled into space. Oh, and there’s a bit where you punch clean through Hot Rod’s face.”

Bullfrog reform, announce Dungeon Keeper 3

“We just thought it’d be nice to be loved again,” said a man. “And Kinect’s a bit crap really, isn’t it?”

Mojang making Lego MMO

“We made a great game about building stuff, and we live in Scandinavia,” said a man. “Bit of a no-brainer, innit?”

Obsidian working on Planescape title

“And no-one’s telling us what to do and giving us a cripplingly short deadline!” exclaimed a man. “So it won’t be released until it’s actually finished. That’ll be a novelty.”

Never update your graphics card again

“We realised that you can just, like, update the firmware or something and it makes your old card as good as a new card,” said a man. “Or something.”

Rock, Paper, Shotgun staff given $10 million “for being awesome.”

I mean, my car died at the weekend. I’ve got to buy a new one and everything. Does it really have to be another second-hand hatchback from the 1990s?

Well, what mod is ever complete, but Morroblivion is alive and well, has functioning downloads and the FAQ states it’s playable.

I don’t see the point of it really though, except for the physics engine (which is badly implemented in Oblivion anyway), since with all the graphics mods + Morrowind Graphics Extender, Morrowind looks better than an unmodded Oblivion anyway (plus actually includes shadows cast by trees and houses), and the rest of the changes made in the Oblivion engine are actually quite meh.

I haven’t played Skyrim yet, maybe Morrowind in Skyrim is a better idea.

On the nostalgia of Morrowind: yeah, it was a convoluted mess at times (and buggy at that), but some parts were so good that it made you forget the problems with the rest. The fact that you could kill any NPC and still complete the game, the amount of content available, all the unmarked possible quests, the strange architecture, all the mystery, the books, it was clearly a world crafted with love. It was of course also a game were flying creatures would attack you out of nowhere (and did so annoyingly often), you interacted with NPC’s as if they were encyclopedia entries, and leaving a stone on the jump key and leaving it there for an hour was considered a good play strategy….
It was a true diamond in the rough, and unfortunately, with Oblivion they threw out a lot of the good with the bad, while adding in some more bad.

Bioware realizes that following Call of Duty and Gears of War isn’t the bestest way to get people’s money and issue an official apology about that “Button–>Awesome” game. “We are sorry we took the path of the money and least bit of effort in our recent game releases, here have Baldur’s Gate 1+2 faithfully remade in that Witcher 2-Engine and Baldur’s Gate 3 is on the way, we realized that if the game sold over 2 million units on the PC in 1998 with the money that EA gave us while letting us become independent again it’ll at least sell 3 times that much nowadays, oh yeah… that also means no more DLC but actual Expansion Packs” said a man.

Developers at Splash Damage have admitted their intent to turn their popular multiplayer series into what they describe as “Mirror’s Edge meets Skyrim.”

Head muckitymuck Dude Guybro said “We realized we developed this awesome, colorful, vibrant world and totally squandered it on a team-based shooter. The logical way forward is to develop this idea to its logical extreme: A first-person parkour RPG.”

The news comes days after Electronic Arts released the third and most critically-acclaimed entry in the Mirror’s Edge series, which some media outlets have called “the best thing since Super Mario Bros.”

“Police say real world thieves using Subversion for inspiration”

New York City police officers announced at a press conference today that a group of thieves has been using the critically-acclaimed game “Subversion” as a training tool for their daring daylight bank robberies.

Police Chief Bob Cop said the game, which lets you mastermind heists in a procedurally-generated city, has given would-be criminals a crash course in

“Saints Row 4 unveiled at Burning Man Festival”

Volition Software has released the first gameplay footage of Saints Row: Da Fourth at Burning Man — the annual community event held in northern Nevada where artists and debauchery collide.

“A place where people drive around in trucks made to look like purple dildos while blaring the Imperial march from Star Wars just seemed like a natural fit for us,” a Volition employee said.

The latest entry in the popular anti-Grand Theft Auto series features the Third Street Saints taking on President Glenn Beck’s administration for control of the country, while finding the lost pieces of an ancient Japanese Gundam, known only as “the Bitchslap Battlebot.”